Kik Nets Nearly $100 Million in Token Sale

Kik Interactive has announced a fruitful end to their Kin token distribution event, raising the Waterloo-based company almost $100 million USD.

The company behind the popular chat platform Kik first detailed their plans to sell the platform’s Ethereum-based cryptocurrency dubbed Kin in August. Kik opened their initial coin offering (ICO) for sale to the public on Sept. 12, intending to raise a total of $125 million through token sales.

The two-week public sale of the blockchain-based currency brought in roughly $47.5 million—the current market value for the 168,732 ETH sold.

The public sale followed a private pre-sale round that pulled in $50 million USD from institutional investors, including Blockchain Capital, Pantera Capital and Polychain Capital. Combined with the money generated from the ICO, Kik doubled their pre-sale revenue to just shy of $100 million; $25 million short of Kik’s target.

“We wanted as many people as possible to participate in the Kin token distribution event. Based on the outpouring of support leading up to and during the event, we clearly achieved that goal,” said Kik CEO Ted Livingston in a release.

The company’s ICO saw 10,000 participants from 117 countries, making the Canadian-originated Kin one of the most widely held cryptocurrencies globally. However, Canada was blacklisted from the ICO as the country labelled Kin as a security, opening up the cryptocurrency to strict regulations.

“Our Kin project needs to move forward, so to avoid risks arising from this uncertainty, we, a Canadian company, have decided to move forward without Canada,” Livingston said in the blog post in early September. “If innovation is to play an important role in Canada’s economy, we can’t afford to let this innovation go elsewhere.”

Kin is integrated into Kik’s chat platform that has over 15 million users the company is relying on to drive the mainstream consumer adoption of their cryptocurrency.

“We envision Kin as the foundation for a decentralized ecosystem of digital services, starting with Kik, and we couldn’t be more thrilled than to build this new future together with you,” said Livingston.